Two years after social media network Facebook sued him for hijacking legitimate Facebook accounts and using them to distribute spam messages, Sanford Wallace also known as Spam King, Spamford and David Frederix surrendered to the FBI on Thursday.
43-year-old Wallace appeared in federal court where he was released on a $100,000 bond and ordered not to access Facebook or MySpace.
In July 2011, after a two-year FBI investigation, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) confirmed that the 43-year-old had been indicted by a federal grand jury on multiple counts of fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer, and criminal contempt
Reacting to the news, Chris Sonderby, Facebook Lead Security and Investigations Counsel said in a statement, “We applaud the efforts of the US Attorney’s Office and the FBI to bring spammers to justice.”
A resident of Las Vegas, Wallace once headed Cyber Promotions when he allegedly sent more than 30 million junk email messages during the 1990s. Prior to that he was infamous for sending out ‘junk faxes.’
Later, he managed to compromise 500,000 Facebook accounts and fill the social networking website’s servers with 27 million spam messages.
Wallace wrote a script that automatically logged in to the accounts he had hacked and retrieved a list of all the users’ friends so that he could post spam messages to their Walls after learning how to bypass Facebook’s spam filters. Though the messages looked fishy, many clicked the included link and entered their email addresses and passwords. Wallace used this information to login credentials and repeat the process and got paid each time he drove traffic to a given spam site.
In March 2009, a judge banned Wallace from using Facebook. A month later he violated the order when he logged into a Facebook account while aboard a Virgin Airlines flight from Las Vegas to New York .
In October 2009, a Federal court ordered Wallace to pay $ 711 million in damages to Facebook for violating The Can-Spam Act. Spamford filed for bankruptcy not long after. He was also found to have “willfully violated” a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction issued in the case, and was therefore referred to the US Attorney’s Office for prosecution of criminal contempt.
In January 2011, he registered a new Facebook account under the name David Sinful-Saturdays Fredericks, again violating the judge’s orders.
Facebook officials claimed they spent a lot of time and money fixing the weak spots, Spamford exploited in order to prevent future attacks.
Wallace has been ordered to return to court in San Jose on Aug. 22 in San Jose. If convicted, he could face more than 10 years in prison and more than $ 2 million in fines.
Commenting on Wallace’s indictment, Sonderby said, “We will continue to pursue and support both civil and criminal consequences for spammers or others who attempt to harm Facebook or the people who use our service.”